My story

This is a bit of a long one, so if you just want to know what me decide to make this change now - jump down to the ‘Turning point’ heading.

The initial pull and getting my PPL

The first time I ever went in a plane when I was only seven years old, it was on the Isle Of Wight, from Sandown airport, in a four seater Cessna 172. It was an extended circuit out over the coast, with the flight only lasting about 10 mins, but I remember being in total awe of what I was seeing out of the window and loved every second of it. That sparked something in me and I became unknowingly obsessed with flying, spending many hours on my PC, playing Flight Unlimited II, and then FS200 when it came out.

The first time I flew on an airliner though, I was 11; it was in a Futura Boeing 737-800 from Exeter (EGTE) to Tenerife South (GCTS) and I got to have a brief look into the cockpit too. It was this trip, and seeing a commercial flight operation which made me realise you could actually do this as a career (I was only young!)

By the time I was 14, I’d been on a couple more holidays abroad, and was pretty sure it was what I wanted to do. For my birthday I was given two things; first was a two hour 737-200 simulator experience, where I got to experience what it’d be like sitting up at the front of an airliner, and the second was an introductory flying lesson at my local flying school. I loved every second of both experiences, and it was the combination of all of the above, which gave me the flying bug and made me want to pursue it as a career.

I started flying lessons at 14, saving every penny from a paper round (& later working in a newsagents), went solo on my 16th birthday, and got my PPL on my 17th.

Deciding on an ATPL flight school

I was attending what’s now Pilot Careers Live in London every time it ran throughout my PPL training, using it to research what’d be needed to go to the next stage of training. I settled on Flight Training Europe as the integrated ATPL school I wanted to go to, largely because I knew a couple of people who’d been there, and rated it highly (they’d also all got a job after, which was promising!)

I flew (Ryanair) down to FTE Jerez when I was still 17 & at school to sit their aptitude tests and visit the school. I was sold on it, and passed all of the tests, however at the interview, they said I was just a little too young still and need a bit of life experience before they thought I’d be able to get through an Airline interview after training, so they told me to come back next year.

2008 financial crisis & going to Uni

Unfortunately the year that followed was 2008, i.e. the financial crisis. Many well established airlines started going bust, recruitment dried up, and suddenly there were many stories of cadets coming out of flight school and not being able to get a job, as well as employed pilots losing their job and having to get work outside of the aviation industry.

At this stage in my life, funding the training would have required the help of my parents, who would have had to draw against the house/mortgage, with me then paying them back once I was working - with everything going on in the world at the time, it just felt like too much of a risk for both them and me. So I decided to Uni to get a degree as a backup option and to get a bit of life experience, with the full intention of going back to flight school after, assuming the industry showed signs of picking up again.

During the 3 years at Uni, I kept flying occasionally, funded through part time jobs, and kept attending the careers events to get a feel for what was going on in the industry.

Being put off

The industry took a little while to recover, so I was still constantly surrounded with stories of people struggling to get jobs, and even for those employed, a complete lack of stability, having to move regularly and/or switch airline to stay employed - vastly different to what I have experienced within my family (lifelong civil service jobs - highly stable/secure!)

Additionally at one of the careers events, there was a talk from a relatively junior British Airways First Officer, giving an insight into the lifestyle. I’m not sure what the intended pitch was, but it came across highly negative, focusing very much on how the job is now very different to the perceived lifestyle, and heavily emphasised how hard the hours were, and that you can’t plan your life more than a couple of weeks in advance due to the rostering.

There was also another talk (I forget now who the speaker was but it was from one of the low cost carriers) and they highlighted how you’d be highly likely to be posted abroad for a couple of years before you could move back to the UK, which didn’t sound very appealing to me!

Both of those talks had quite an influence on me at that age.

Ultimately over those 3 years at uni, the stories about the job market, and those two talks really put me off the career path, as it sounded like it was near impossible to maintain a social life, or have a stable job/place to live, and I wasn’t sure that was how I wanted to live my life just to be able to fly. I also had a bit of a flair for and was enjoying software development, so my focus shifted, aiming to get a job in IT that would allow me to continue to fly as a hobby instead of a career.

Post university - working & flying for fun (in cycles)

During university, I had a few jobs, all in IT, including some very well paid contract work for a web development company.

Within a couple of months of graduating, I got a job in the civil service, as software developer, and that’s where I’ve been now for the last 15 years. I’ve been promoted a number of times to the point where I’m earning a salary comparible to what you’d get as an entry level First Officer at some airlines (more than in some of the smaller regional ones).

In those 15 years, flying was a bit sporadic, and went in cycles.

While my salary was steadily increasing, the cost of flying was also increasing at the same rate, so the ‘fun money’ I had set aside each month was often not quite enough to sustain flying regularly if some un-expected expense came up, for example, a long spell of bad weather or aricraft issues, stopping me flying within the ‘club currency’ time limit and then having to take an instructor up on the next flight.

Similarly, more interesting flying, like visiting other airfields, would often involve additional landing fees, & a longer flight time than my monthly budget would allow, so the flying I was doing tended to become a little repetitive, and often felt like I was flying just to keep myself current rather than for enjoyment, and so I’d either stop by choice, or essentially be forced to financially.

But there’d always after a period of time, either be some event that re-sparked my desire to fly, or I’d just miss it enough to sacrifice other things and spend the money to get current again.

COVID pandemic

The last loop of my ‘flying cycle’ was about a year before the COVID pandemic, I’d learned of a flying club that was very close to where I live and had a cheaper hourly rate than most other places, they also had more of an active group of hobby flyers, meaning the chances of linking up to do more interesting longer flights (e.g. someone else flies to a destination, then I fly back) was much higher. So after getting the medical and SEP rating re-validated, I had a number of familiarisation flights there to get used to the (new to me) aircraft, and just as I was close to being signed off, the world shut down with COVID, which meant I wasn’t flying, and my SEP rating lapsed again during the lockdowns (like most people I imagine!).

Around 4 years passed by very quickly, I’d been lucky to remain working from home throughout the pandemic and that had become the ‘new normal’, I’d also decided to shift focus a bit to build my savings, and flying for fun just did not seem like a good use of money, despite how much I missed it. However, to satisfy that need, given MSFS2024 had just come out and looked incredible, I opted to splurge a little and got myself a VR headset, & a high spec PC to be able to play it on max settings - and it was great, very close to real flying & it was enough to scratch the itch without spending upwards of £200/hour (when you factor everything in)

The turning point & re-spark

Around the same time towards the end of 2024, life got turned upside down for me - Work had become highly stressful and was no longer really enjoyable due to a number of factors and I was getting burnt out, but a much bigger factor was that I had a health scare which was suspected to be cancer for a few months, and that was an incredibly worrying and unsettling time! Thankfully, it turned out to be nothing serious, totally benign and a relatively simple operation cured it completely.

However those few months of uncertainty, combined with the stresses at work, followed by around a month off work to recover from the surgery, was like a huge kick that really made me re-think about my life choices - and the question that was front and center in my mind was:

What would I have regretted about my life if the diagnosis/outcome had been more serious?

And there was only really one answer…

Not pursuing a career as a commercial airline pilot.

Re-researching the career

I started researching the career heavily again, with a very different mindset and outlook on life than the 17-20 year old me did, attending the careers events again, and open days at the various flight schools,

I realised that although some of the worries I initially had about the lifestyle are valid, it is very airline dependent and has changed quite a bit over the years, with many airlines now offering more predictable roster patterns that get you home every night, preferences for earlies/lates, as well as protected days off, and options like part time working, or extended leave.

Additionally Brexit did have at least one positive, as it now means that with no automatic right to live/work in the EU any more, as a British citizen, with a UK licence, you’re only going to be flying G-reg aircraft out of a UK base, rather than being posted abroad when you get a job.

I’m not suggesting it’s as stable/predictable as the 9-5 hybrid/work-from-home job I currently have, but the things that put me off it in the past no longer do, especially after speaking to many pilots both in person and online through forums/following their socials etc, and i’m yet to meet one who regrets going into the career. And they’ve all been able to maintain a life outside of flying/work quite easily with a bit of effort (not dissimilar to what you have to do in your 30’s anyway!).

Working towards it again

So, that leaves me with where I am now, at the point of creating this site and writing this article.

I have investigated the options for getting my ATPL, and visited almost all of the big integrated flight schools, however I’ve decided that as most of them are residential courses, and will not take into account any of the flying I’ve already done, they do not really fit with my life at the moment, and are also a huge risk for me, to quit my job to go full time at a school with no job guaranteed at the end of it.

So for me it’s the modular route, as I can continue working (keeping the house ticking over) while pursuing the dream!

Funding wise I’ve been smart, and maybe a little lucky with saving since the pandemic, and have been able to build enough to cover the costs via the modular route, given I can reduce it by well over £10K having already got my PPL and around half of the hours needed for hour building to start the CPL.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on for a long time here, so there’s my life story so far, and thank you if you’ve read this far! - what comes next will all be documented via the posts on this site, and maybe this’ll get another section, when there’s a milestone worth writing about!